What work might robots take away from humans? (2)

From
Carl Benedikt Frey, University of Oxford, UK

Adee argues that automation anxiety is overblown, but conflates current automation with the future potential for automation. She cites my research with Michael Osborne, which estimates that roughly 47 per cent of US jobs are exposed to automation technologies – but argues that this is overstated because recent surveys of the workplace in Germany suggest that not very many jobs have been automated away so far.

The tractor had virtually no impact on jobs before 1920: should this have been taken as evidence that it was an unimportant technology? It took almost half a century for its full effects to materialise. …